Kate Benson in the Sydney Morning Herald:

When Mehdi Jaffari was told his left carotid artery was so severely blocked he faced the risk of an imminent stroke, he turned the clock back to medieval times.

The 52-year-old counsellor, from Chatswood, bought more than 35 leeches from a Victorian farmer and applied them to his body daily. Within five days, a CT angiogram showed the artery had cleared, stunning staff at Royal North Shore Hospital and his family.

Leech therapy, first documented in Greece more than 4000 years ago, is not new in Sydney. More than 50 Richardsonianus australis leeches are kept in a tank at Liverpool Hospital for use on patients who have had skin grafts or severed digits because their saliva contains hirudin, a chemical that acts as a powerful anticoagulant and vasodilator.

More here.  [Thanks to Susan Anthony.]

Cognition studies clash with ‘New Yorker’ rationale.

Brilliant comment on the New Yorker cover controversy by 3QD friend Mahzarin Banaji, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

On the morning of July 14, the Internet was clogged with discussions of the latest New Yorker cover depicting a Muslim Barack Obama and a terrorist Michelle Obama in fist-bumping celebration before a fireplace in which lies a burning American flag, while above it hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

Asked by the Huffington Post whether, in retrospect, and in response to the public outcry, he regretted having produced the cover, the image’s creator, Barry Blitt, said: “Retrospect? Outcry? The magazine just came out 10 minutes ago, at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not.”

If Blitt were aware of the science of social perception, he wouldn’t need a few days to decide. If he were cognizant of the facts about how the mind works, the simple associations that typify the brain’s ordinary connection-making, he might have thought differently before he sketched the first flame in that fireplace. If he had paid attention to a few of the dozens of experiments available — even in the popular media — that describe how the mind learns and believes, he and his boss wouldn’t have responded as they did to the questions posed to them the day after the cover appeared.

More here.

///

Gone Are The Days
Norman MacCaig

Impossible to call a lamb a lambkin

or say eftsoons or spell you ladye.

My shining armour bleeds when it’s scratched;

I blow the nose that’s part of my visor.
…….

When I go pricking o’er the plain

I say Eightpence please to the sad conductress.

The towering landscape you live in has printed

on its portcullis Bed and breakfast.
…….

I don’t regret it. There are wildernesses

enough in Rose Street or the Grassmarket

where dragons’ breaths are methylated

and social workers trap the unwary.
…….

So don’t expect me, lady with no e,

to look at a lamb and feel lambkin

or give me a down look because I bought

my greaves and cuisses at Marks and Spencers.
…….

Pishtushery’s out. But oh, how my heart swells

to see you perched, perjink, on a bar stool.

And though epics are shrunk to epigrams, let me

buy you a love potion, a gin, a double.

….

Via Hootsbuddy’s Place.

From CNN:

Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” became a runaway phenomenon on the Internet and was turned into a best-selling book, died Friday of pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University announced on its Web site.

Pausch, 47, a computer science professor, delivered the lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, a month after being told he had three to six months to live because his cancer had returned.

More here.  And do take an hour and a quarter to watch this video of the moving lecture:

From Scientific American:

There has been a raging debate over whether cell phones—or more specifically electromagnetic radiation that they emit—up a person’s cancer risk. The latest chapter: Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, this week warned consumers to limit exposure to cell phone radiation—and alerted parents to beware of possible effects on their kids’ developing brains. Although the evidence remains controversial, he is convinced that the radiation poses a risk to human health. As he pointed out, a number of countries, including France, Germany and India, have already issued such warnings to their citizens. Herberman outlined 10 ways to reduce exposure. Among them: reduce cell phone use, use a hands-free earpiece, switch ears while chatting to limit radiation concentration in one spot, and avoid using mobile phones in public places to limit second-hand radiation. In particular, he cautions parents about the possible effects of cell phone radiation on children. He indicates that kids should only be allowed to use these devices in cases of emergency, as their developing brains are more likely to be susceptible to possible side effects.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It is very hard to write well about ethics, and especially so in a way that engages and interests that elusive phantom of writers’ imaginations, the general reader. But Susan Neiman’s previous book on ethics, “Evil in Modern Thought,” was widely and favorably reviewed, and the present work is a worthy successor. Neiman’s particular skill lies in expressing sensitivity, intelligence and moral seriousness without any hint of oversimplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety. She clearly and unflinchingly sees life as it is, but also sees how it might be, and could be, if we recaptured some of the hopes and ideals that currently escape us.

In other words, like its predecessor, “Moral Clarity” is a sustained defense of a particular set of values, and of a moral vocabulary that enables us to express them. Neiman sees these values as neglected or threatened all along the political spectrum. They received their strongest defenses in the moral thought of the Enlightenment, in David Hume and Adam Smith, but more particularly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us. Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.

More here.

Der Spiegel interviews Lila Abu-Lughod on her and Ahmad Sa’di’s new book Nakba:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Nakba and the founding of the State of Israel can’t be separated from one another. What does this mean for relations between Israelis and Palestinians today?

Abu-Lughod: Palestinians and Israelis are tightly entangled. Any resolution must involve a recognition of the fact that Israel was founded on the expulsion of Palestinians. Then we can think and talk together about restitution, redress, compensation, or whatever it takes for a more just way forward. In Israel and Palestine we have an amazing opportunity — to think about changing history by considering a democratic state with a living future for everyone.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In your book you point out that the children of those Palestinians who lived through the Nakba and the children of the Jews who were persecuted in Europe and made it to Israel both have to deal with the traumatic experiences of their parents.

Abu-Lughod: My colleague Ahmad Sa’di, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and has both studied the history and been subjected to the painful reality of living in a state based on race, writes in our book, “Nakba,” about the terrible irony of a people who had suffered so much becoming the perpetrators of violence.

Here’s a weird apparent fraud perpetrated by CBS.  (MoveOn.org has a petition calling CBS to come clean.)

From the Jed Report:

[H/t: Darcy Argue and Lindsay Beyerstein]

From Scientific American:

Can we tweak certain genes to stave off the aging process–or, conversely, to speed it up? New research indicates that it may one day be possible. Scientists have discovered genetic switches in roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans)—whose genetic makeup is remarkably similar to that of humans—that apparently cause the spineless critters to grow old when flicked on but, when off, may extend their lives. “This is a new and potentially powerful circuit that has just been discovered,” says Brown University biologist Marc Tatar, who was not involved in the study. “The take-home message is that aging can be slowed and managed by manipulating signaling circuits within cells.”

The new finding challenges the prevailing theory of aging, which is that our bodies wear out, or “rust,” in much the same way as cars and other machines due to damage inflicted on our cellular DNA (genetic material) by factors such as smoking, disease, the sun’s ultraviolet rays and chemically reactive molecules called free radicals, which are produced when our cells make energy. It suggests instead that a combination of factors is at play—that in addition to rusting, there are also certain genes that may carry instructions to start the aging process.

More here.

From Nature:

Five NASA satellites named after Themis, the Greek goddess of justice, have finally revealed the trigger behind the brilliant auroras that dance across the polar skies. The Themis mission is an attempt to settle a long-standing debate on the origins of the rippling lights. Scientists know that the aurora are caused by electrons streaming from space and delivering a kick to gas molecules in the atmosphere. As the molecules relax, they release the energy as light — blue from nitrogen and green and red from oxygen. But the trigger that unleashes those electrons has remained a mystery. The original energy source for the aurora is the solar wind, a stream of charged plasma that billows from the Sun and deforms the Earth’s magnetic field, producing a long ‘magnetotail’ on the far side of the Earth.

While coronal mass ejections can cause larger plasma storms that last for more than 24 hours, deformation of the magnetotail can create smaller substorms that last just a few hours. But scientists disagree on the precise order of events between the solar wind and the substorm. One camp holds that the key step is a disruption, which occurs about 60,000 kilometres away from the Earth, in the electrical current that travels across the magnetotail. The other camp contends that the first step is actually a realignment of the Earth’s magnetic field some 120,000 kilometres away, roughly one-third the distance to the Moon. According the the Themis results, published today by the journal Science,¹ this latter explanation is the correct one.

More here.

I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal and geographic nature. It is also probably due to a sort of undiagnosed dyslexia. I don’t mean to say by this that my mother never took me to the doctor; on the contrary, until the age of ten I was an assiduous visitor to doctor’s offices and even hospitals, but from that point on my mother decided I was strong enough to handle anything.

But let us return to the problem. When I was little, I played soccer. My number was 11, the number of Pepe and Zagalo in the World Cup in Sweden, and I was an enthusiastic player but a pretty bad one, though my left leg was my good leg and supposedly lefties never lose steam during a match. In my case, this wasn’t true: I almost always lost steam, though every once in a while, say once every six months, I would play a good match and recover at least a part of the enormous credit lost. At night, as is natural, before going to sleep, I would run circles in my head around my pitiful condition as a soccer player. It was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my right hand.

more from Triple Canopy here.

In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle of friends “organ recitals.”)

Reading is a different matter, apparently. People seem to have a nearly unlimited appetite for consuming published medical tales. These range from the inspirational to the bizarre and can be written by cancer survivors, emergency-room doctors, hospice nurses, grieving relatives, drug addicts, philosophically inclined diagnosticians, and sufferers from a wide variety of mental-health complaints. In most cases, the allure is somewhere between a car accident’s and a mud fight’s. We seem to enjoy (pace Susan Sontag) regarding the pain of others.

more from Bookforum here.

what a poet! and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
But when I soared
it rained.
—Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” (1954)

In the summer of 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky paid a call on Maxim Gorky and read him the first draft of his new long poem “A Cloud in Pants.” Its verses initially had been scribbled, so his friends reported, on cigarette boxes. As the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky recalls, “Aleksey Maksimovich [Gorky] told me that he was stunned and that even a little gray bird hopping on the path ruffled its feathers, cocked its head and still could not bring itself to fly away.”

more from Boston Review here.

Alex Taurel and Shadi Hamid in the Christian Science Monitor:

President Bush’s vision of a democratic Middle East was premised in part on the region’s popular Islamist groups reconciling themselves to the give-and-take nature of democracy.

It might make sense then, that the Bush administration would do what it could to support a party that has made such a transformation in Turkey. But it’s not.

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which fashioned itself as the Muslim equivalent of Europe’s Christian Democrats, has stood out by passing a series of unprecedented political reforms as the country’s ruling party.

Yet the Turkish Constitutional Court – bastion of the hard-line secularist old guard – is now threatening to close down the AKP and ban its leading figures, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from party politics for five years. And the Bush administration, in the face of this impending judicial coup, has chosen to remain indifferent. The consequences could reach beyond a setback to democracy in Turkey and affect the Middle East.

More here.

[Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Donald G. McNeil, Jr in the New York Times:

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Wednesday that they would spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking.

The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a billion people in the 21st century, 10 times as many as it killed in the 20th.

This time, most are expected to be in poor countries like Bangladesh and middle-income countries like Russia. In an effort to cut that number, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of a $125 million gift he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.

More here.  [Thanks to Rebecca Meisels.]

///
On July 18th 2008 Kay Ryan was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2004, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize…

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”  —New York Times, Books July 17, 2008

….

Chop

The bird

walks down

the beach along

the glazed edge

the last wave

reached. His

each step makes

a perfect stamp–

smallish, but as

sharp as an

emperor’s chop.

Stride, stride,

goes the emperor

down his wide

mirrored promenade

the sea bows

to repolish.
….

The Other Shoe

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.

Thanks to Leah Culleny

///

Stuart Schwartzapfel in the Wired blog Autopia:

There are several not-from-this-world motorcycles in our midst. This most likely stems from the surge in sales that motorcycle-industry designers and executives are now savoring, thanks to all that madness at the pump.

To capitalize on this newfound popularity, why not innovate with, dare I say it, out-of-the-box approaches to design and functionality. To this end, there is a noticeable influx of radically different concept and production bikes hitting the scene. Each one challenges preconceived notions about motorcycles as we have come to know them.

Perhaps not as sci-fi as Deus Ex Machina or eco-conscious as Suzuki’s Crossfire, but oozing with enough testosterone to please a female bodybuilder, is the Icare concept from Enzyme Design. If bad-ass had an older brother, Icare would be it.

Enzyme, a highly hip French design house that dabbles in everything from product design to contemporary art, says Icare is a “superlative motor bike” that would fill a currently vacant niche for top-of-the-range bikes. Enzyme should check out the Confederate line for some high-end examples to position Icare against. Nonetheless, the bike is designed like a piece of art with the thought that experienced and deep-pocketed motorcyclists would like something more exclusive than a Ducati. Enzyme says its design inspiration came from the greatest hits album for Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Porsche and Audi.